In our 12 Questions blog series, we feature interviews with someone from the crowdSPRING community. For these interviews, we pick people who add value to our community – in the blog, in the forums, in the projects. Plainly – activities that make crowdSPRING a better community. Be professional, treat others with respect, help us build something very special, and we’ll take notice.
We’re very proud to feature Dave Porter (crowdSPRING username: brainstorm ) today. Dave lives and works in suburban Pittsburgh PA, USA.
1. Please tell us about yourself.
My name is Dave Porter, (aka brainstorm) I live in a suburb outside of Pittsburgh PA, USA with my wife, 2 teenage sons and a pit bull…who can’t control her licker. I still live in the same community I grew up in (literally 1 mile from my parents house). Guess I didn’t stray too far from home.
2. How did you become interested in design?
I always doodled as a kid, filling up legal pads and any blank piece of paper with my crazy little cartoon characters. I loved MAD magazine and always admired the talent and loved the twisted humor. As a student I was not exactly top of my class and my sketching would drive the teachers crazy.
In my junior year of high school they were offering students the opportunity to go to a local vo-tech trade school on a 2 year program. I looked at the list of courses and noticed there was a Commercial Art program, so I signed up. This is where I initially got exposed to graphic design. My instructor had worked in the ad agency business for years (his claim to fame was working on the Nestea plunge ad campaign) and was now teaching at the school, I couldn’t get enough of the class and was now a graphics addict.
As we close out 2010, we reached another important milestone at crowdSPRING – more than 80,000 designers and writers (from 185+ countries) now work on crowdSPRING.
We’re proud of our community but humbled to know that 80,000 is small when compared to the population of the world – expected to exceed 7 billion people in 2011.
National Geographic is planning a year long series focusing on the world’s population. It looks to be a phenomenal series, based on the preview video below.
Some startling facts from the video:
The global population is projected to be 9 billion by 2045
5 people are born every second
In 2008, for the first time ever, more people lived in cities than in rural areas
By 2050, 70% of us will live in megacities
5% of us consume 23% of the world’s energy
13% of us don’t have access to clean drinking water
Google is giving away $100 million dollars in AdWords credits to small businesses that sign up for an AdWords account BEFORE December 31, 2010. Up to one million small businesses can sign up for this program.
If you sign up in the next two days, you’ll have until February 15, 2011 to spend $100 on AdWords advertising and then Google will give you a $100 credit to run more ads.
If you’ve been thinking about trying AdWords – this is a good opportunity to let Google pay for half of your trial. Realizing that AdWords can be intimidating for some small businesses, Google even offers a toll free number (800.898.1222) to help small businesses set up their first account.
You might also be interested to know that Google offers many outstanding resources for small business. Recently, Google has focused on making those resources easier for small business to use. For example, Google Boost allows small businesses to connect with potential customers using Google Adwords – by letting small businesses create advertising programs that do not need to be managed on an ongoing basis. Google also has programs that provide small businesses with free photo shoots of their business. And Google has made available a free and useful search engine optimization starter guide that every small business owner should read.
Every day on the crowdSPRING Twitter account and on my own Twitter account, I post links to posts or videos I enjoyed reading or viewing. These posts and videos are about logo design, web design, startups, entrepreneurship, small business, leadership, social media, marketing, and more! Here are some of the links that I’ve liked and shared this past week!
The image above is from a fun collection of de-motivational posters. You can find a link to a post with 39 more such posters in the Random Fun section below.
I’ve long been interested in the theory behind Dunbar’s Number. There’s much debate concerning social networks and friendships. Some assert that we’re living in the Renaissance of social media and our potential to build friendships is better than ever. I believe we’re in the Dark Ages of social media.
We can’t usually see our friends on social networks (except for their avatar), and that makes our conversations more detached and impersonal. We send @ messages on Twitter, post updates on Facebook, send emails and direct messages, and think of those activities as conversations. And they are indeed conversations – through these conversations, we learn, share, teach, laugh, discuss, debate, etc. As Dunbar wrote in the NYT op/ed piece:
Facebook and other social networking sites allow us to keep up with friendships that would otherwise rapidly wither away. And they do something else that’s probably more important, if much less obvious: they allow us to reintegrate our networks so that, rather than having several disconnected subsets of friends, we can rebuild, albeit virtually, the kind of old rural communities where everyone knew everyone else. Welcome to the electronic village.
But as we continue to become a society that spends increasing amounts of time looking at others through a computer, are we losing a bit of emotion with each conversation? In the quest for popularity, often measured in the number of followers and friends, are we losing perspective? Are we more likely to forget when we’re online that harsh words and criticism can hurt others? And we quicker to judge others when we have the cloak of invisibility surrounding our online activities? And is this trend impacting our offline relationships too?
Seeing as how it’s the end of another year, I thought I would take a shot at a 10 best list of my very own. But instead of focusing on just one category of thing, I am going to mix it up and make it about various resources any entrepreneur might benefit from. Tools, blogs, Twitter personalities, magazines and newspapers, conferences – any should be fair game for this particular list.
This is a subjective list (as all such lists should be) and I can’t claim that what I find useful, you will too. So I considered resources that I use on a regular basis, that provide real value to me in my own life as a startup co-Founder and that I think others will benefit from. I hope that you will feel compelled to comment and add to the list with other resources that bring you value or joy.
1. A great blog for entrepreneurs should be like a wonderful novel. Not that it is fictional in any way; it should be at once intriguing, provocative, and entertaining. This is what I get when I read Paul Graham. Graham is the founder of Y Combinator, the leading startup incubator, and the essays on his blog providethought-leadership on topics as varied as startup funding, marketing, and life lived well.
2. My favorite business section of any newspaper is the one I read daily in The New York Times. The columnists cover everything from media to finance to advertising to economics and I benefit from them all. The coverage of breaking news is as in-depth as can be found anywhere and the analysis is provocative and thorough.
3. An awesome online tech news resource that I visit on a regular basis is (of course) TechCrunch. If it impacts our industry, you can count on it being covered on this site. Gossip you say? Sure, TC publishes its fair share of rumor and innuendo, but hey, we deserve a little fun every so often, don’t we?
4. Computer applications are our lives, right? We spend more time gazing into the screen than we do gazing at our own children and the software we use says a great deal about us a s people. Do we spend more time on WordPress than Excel? Are we more likely to fire up Google Docs or QuickBooks? Our small team collectively uses dozens of applications on a daily basis, but (outside of our browsers) the one we all have in common is Basecamp, 37Signal’s collaboration and project management tool. Wherever we find ourselves, whoever is collaborating on a given project, whenever we need access, Basecamp is there – easy to use, simple interface, powerful features. Like a good roasted marshmallow, what’s not to like?
5.Drive-time radio can be infuriating – ceaseless noise, annoying commercials, bad music, meaningless local news updates combine to make me cherish some good old silence. Dependent on traffic, I spend 30-60 minutes driving home, and most evenings I am fortunate to leave the office around the time that my local NPR station is airing Marketplace. This 30 minute show is a shining light in the world of business radio; smart, incisive, funny, and creative, Marketplace covers stories that no one else seems to be aware of. Where else can you hear a story on how to a person who is $50,000 in debt does their holiday shopping followed by another on how gold Krugerrands have been showing up in Salvation Army collection kettles? The website is an invaluable archive of past stories, any of which you can listen to via mp3 or read via the transcripts provided.
Every day on the crowdSPRING Twitter account and on my own Twitter account, I post links to posts or videos I enjoyed reading or viewing. These posts and videos are about logo design, web design, startups, entrepreneurship, small business, leadership, social media, marketing, and more! Here are some of the links that I’ve liked and shared this past week!
The image above is from the movie Tron: Legacy, which opened last week. Look in the OTHER section below for an excellent review of the movie with a superb discussion of why the sequel missed an opportunity to do what the original Tron movie did – introduce innovative ideas about technology.
Well it’s that merry time of year again. We’re gonna rest a bit, enjoy the slow pace for the next couple of weeks, take the opportunity hang out with friends and family, perhaps even sip an egg nog. Let’s see now, what else are we looking forward to? Ah yes – tax planning!
The end of the year is a great opportunity to think ahead by a few weeks and start getting everything in order for the accountants, but also to consider how you might leverage some of the tax credits and incentives that are available to your business. Here are 10 tips to discuss with your accountant – let’s see if any of these can apply to your business!
1. Always stay on top! At crowdSPRING we try to plan throughout the year and we do this by coordinating with the accounting firm at the end of every quarter. The idea is that by touching base on a quarterly schedule we can be more efficient at tax time and by providing the accountants an opportunity to provide notes and feedback as we go through the year instead of waiting for Q1 to start the work, we can accomplish tax chores faster and more efficiently and allow them to focus on saving us money on our taxes rather than using that time to organize the information.This is the checklist we use when assembling our quarterly package: Year to date payroll journal showing YTD totals for wages, payroll taxes, etc; 401K withholdings reconciled to payments; Bank and investment account statements with reconciliations; Credit card statements and Reconciliations; Spreadsheet with YTD business intelligence data.
2. Defer and spend! The idea is to use the end of the year to actually reduce profits by decreasing revenue and increasing expense. Two easy ways to do this are to first defer deposits to your operating accounts until after the first of the year, and then to accelerate purchases into December. For instance, hang onto those checks for the next couple of weeks and deposit them after New Years day then get out and buy those things you will need soon anyhow – office supplies, the new computer, any deductible expenses that you can get in before the year closes will provide additional deductible dollars for the accountant to leverage.
3. 179 gifts for your company! Under Section 179 of the tax code, you can deduct the cost of certain assets which you purchased in 2010. Recent tax legislation has increased the maximum Section 179 deduction to $500,000! That’s a lot of laptops.
4. Bad debts, bad! We all incur a creation amount of bad debt in the course of running our business. You may have difficulty collecting certain receivables or the recession may have forced some of your vendors into bankruptcy, rendering their debts worthless. As a general rule, the bad debts of a business may be deducted from gross income when they become worthless. Check any of these with your accountant and see if there is benefit to be gained.
5. If it’s broke, fix it! If you have to repair a business asset, the entire cost of that repair is deductible and will directly reduce your income for the year. So get on that to-do list and be sure to make all of your minor repairs before the end of the year!
Winter is finally here! Know what that means? Ski trips! But how does one go about choosing the perfect slope? It is as simple as SkiTown.com. SkiTown.com is your guide to skiing and snowboarding in North America. It’s equipped with a resort guide featuring over 600 resorts in the United States and Canada. All you have to do is click on the state or province you would like to find a resort in, locate a resort and SkiTown.com updates you on current weather conditions, trail maps of the resort, prices for lift tickets and season passes, lodging, directions, and even reviews from previous customers. If you decide you like that resort there’s a convenient flight search on the page to book flights right away. How simple is that!
Charles Greer recently posted a logo project on the site for SkiTown.com. He received over 150 entries but it was finally awarded to Lanex! The project was to update the logo but also make it more adaptable for a smart phone application. That app would definitely come in handy!
I had a chance to talk with Charles and get some insider information for you guys on everything from great podcasts to check out and advice on starting a company of your own so read on…
1. How did you get things designed before crowdSPRING?
We used to have designers on staff years ago, and we used some local graphic designers when we no longer needed full time designers on staff. A local design shop was charging us $500 – $1000 for three comps of a design and we had to choose from one of them. If we did not like the designs or they required significant tweaking we would be charged additional fees.
2. Why in the world did you decide to use crowdSPRING?!
We decided that we needed to redesign our logo so that it would work in an App world as well as the web. After reading about crowdSPRING in various publications, we thought we would give it a try. We were overwhelmed with the number of designs we received, over 120 of them. Some did not seem to be good fits for us at all, most were pretty good and there were eight that we thought were really outstanding! SkiTown.com is an online guide to every ski area in North America, and we expected most designs to come from the US and Canada, people closer to our industry and market. However, we received some truly excellent design ideas from all over the world, even in places that do not get any snow, like Indonesia! In fact that is where our winning design came from! We were able to communicate our thoughts on the graphics submitted with the designers who very often would come back with tweaks or a whole new design. Some of the designers submitted more than 5 separate design ideas. It was awesome!
Every day on the crowdSPRING Twitter account and on my own Twitter account, I post links to posts or videos I enjoyed reading or viewing. These posts and videos are about logo design, web design, startups, entrepreneurship, small business, leadership, social media, marketing, and more! Here are some of the links that I’ve liked and shared this past week!
The image above shows the enormous size of the African continent. You can fit most of the rest of the world into the African continent’s landmass. The full graphic is in the Fun section below.
crowdSPRING is the world's #1 marketplace for entrepreneurs, small businesses, nonprofits and agencies who need custom logo design, web design, a new company name or other writing and design services. Over 105,000 designers and writers work on crowdSPRING. We are trusted by more than 26,000 satisfied clients around the world.
1. Please tell us about yourself.
Seeing as how it’s the end of another year, I thought I would take a shot at a 10 best list of my very own. But instead of focusing on just one category of thing, I am going to mix it up and make it about various resources any entrepreneur might benefit from. Tools, blogs, Twitter personalities, magazines and newspapers, conferences – any should be fair game for this particular list.
Well it’s that merry time of year again. We’re gonna rest a bit, enjoy the slow pace for the next couple of weeks, take the opportunity hang out with friends and family, perhaps even sip an egg nog. Let’s see now, what else are we looking forward to? Ah yes – tax planning!
